There are meaningful alternatives. You can choose to pay more and get an electric car and pay for net 0 electricity. For a bit more you could shop from a local farm. If enough people did that it would incentive those options to get better, but they are all choices I could make today

edit: and in fact if we want to solve these issue the sort of actions we will need to take. There isn't anyone who could fix these problems easily without sacrifices and is choosing not to

Ah, yes, I will do this with all the free money I have laying around.

I guess my point is not to shame people and maybe responsibility gets a bit convoluted at some point, but the reason fixing global warming is so hard is that it does require a sacrifice of living standards. We can probably develop tech to make it less painful and ideally not even painful at all but that will come at the price of some other tech we could be having worked on. People prefer to frame this as a few bad actors who just need forced to do the right thing because they would rather not admit that they themselves are making the economic choices leading to global warming and I do really think most people on here could be sacrificing to lower their emissions

You can't make sacrifices on your living standards when you're already poor and don't have any room to sacrifice. You can't make an informed decision on sacrifices to your living standards when working all the time and don't have any time to go pierce through the veil of megaconglomerate multi source supply chains. You can't make meaningful sacrifices when you live in a community that is too small to be served by more than a virtual monopoly of suppliers.

Why stop at buying your own electricity plant? Make your own solar panels to make absolutely sure no chemicals are getting leached into the local water supply. Hell, mine your own cobalt or lithium while you're at it. How else are we going to make such a Great Leap Forward?

I think you're just describing why fixing global warming is hard. Literally the only way to fix global warming is making serious changes that will change how people live their lives. Obviously we won't want to do it all at once, but there aren't evil companies who can make some simple changes without impacting us.

Worth noting come of those tradeoffs may need to be accepting environmental pollution of the traditional kind. We also can absolutely redistribute wealth. Literally all standards, car safety, apartment safety, job safety, impact the poorest most, and we can and should solve that with redistributive policies, but I doubt most on hackernews are in the receiving redistributions slice of society

I'll volunteer the Facebook devs, there are plenty of talented people working on roles that I think most of us would be happy to do with out.